Fast, Very Fast

I have been inspired to try something new. Inspiration has come from several sources.

The streets of New York are home an awesome number of people. My interactions with the homeless in New York has been limited. A. and I encountered a couple gentlemen last month. One of them was drunk and puking, the other was adamant that we should call an ambulance. There was a hospital in eye-sight, maybe two blocks away. A week ago I gave undelivered meals-on-heels food to a man named Kevin. He was sitting on Park Avenue asking for money from passers-by. Then there is the scary looking guy that I frequently pass on Smith Street. He scares me because the color around his eyes implies drug use and he is always angry. It is quite unusual for a homeless person to yell "fuck you, bitch" when refused money.

In three separate contexts, I have had the five pillars of Islam laid out before me. One was in church. The other was in a book. The third was from a taxi driver. Of particular interest to me was number four: fasting during Ramadan.

The final source of inspiration is the Christian lent season.

For those that may not have figured it out yet, I am fasting. I'm not subscribing to any particular fasting protocol. My strategy is to not eat during the day. If the sun is up, I haven't been eating. I do allow myself to drink water. I am currently on day three of my fasting exercise.

There were a couple things I hoped to gain from fasting. I have thought about fasting in the past, but never done it. Like many things in my life until recently, it was something that I thought about, but always mapped the actual doing to other people. A big part of doing this fasting now is that it is something that I am doing which will yield direct experience for me.

Speaking of experience, I went into this having some notion of becoming more able to empathize with the hungry people I see around me everyday. This fasting seems to be having that effect. I spend a non-trivial amount of time everyday thinking about being hungry and how that effects my life. More on that later.

The last motivator was that I wanted to participate in a meaningful way in the lent season. I like the idea of doing activities that help me think about my connection to material things.

So here's the list of observations I have made over the last couple days:

• I do not need very much food to survive
• I need food to get to that level higher than just surviving
• I would like to try eating much less food on a daily basis
• Being hungry adversely affects my ability to think, but it is different than being tired
• Being hungry affects my ability to run, but not as much as I would have thought
• Being hungry does not make me tired, in fact, the opposite is likely the case
• I am very irritable when hungry (but I already knew that)
• Feed hungry people before you want to get anything out of them

All things considered, I am frankly amazed that I was able to compose this post. I haven't eaten in about twenty hours. Not sure how long I will continue fasting. I am strongly motivated to not let my self imposed hunger adversely affect my personal relationships. Unfortunately, it has already been a negative factor in that game. With that said, I'm going to eat something so that I can be social tonight!

Excuse Me While I Have A Life

It has been a while. A long while. Over a month, actually, since I've posted.

In life, we all make choices. Most of the time, most of us make choices without knowing why. More often than not, we avoid conscious analysis of the rationale behind our choices. Consider those Christmas cookies that we have been eating recently. What is the thought process going on there? For me, and I gamble for you also, it goes something like this: "oooh, look! a cookie. yum yum yum" [eat cookie] "yum yum yum". There was no thought into the short, medium, and long term health consequences. No consideration of how friends and family might update their opinions of us upon observing this gluttonous behavior. At best, a moment may be spent to consider the relative tastiness of the red versus the green cookies. But only a moment, because we all know the red wins.

The point here is that none of us go into the holidays with the stated goal eating like crap and suffering the obvious consequences, but most of us do it anyway.

Every once in a while, we make decisions with a purpose behind them. And proportionally more rarely, the cause we set in motion with our choices yields the desired effect. Such was the case with my choice to leave the SLC for the NYC.

Alas, a prime side effect of the bliss that has been my existence in New York has been gross negligence posting to this blog. Know that this is not meant to be a slight to my loyal reader(s). It is just that the opportunity to add to my rather thin mosaic of life experiences has been overwhelmingly compelling. Maybe one day this plethora of experience will allow me to write a half way descent blog post. Until then, this is what I've got.

Some Random Thoughts

First random thought: I am really enjoying New York.

Second random thought: I am not enjoying my money evaporating.

Third random thought: I am getting what I wanted from this big giant move.

Fourth random thought: I am ambivalent about the lack of free time I find myself having/not-having.

Fifth random thought: When I don't think about my friends in Salt Lake, I'm not sad about having ditched them. When I do think about it, I feel guilty and sad.

Sixth random thought: I went running this morning. My it-band hurts because I ran on the sidewalk and the sidewalk is concrete and therefore very hard. The good thing about this run was that I seem to have retained some of my cardiovascular ability thus far. I can tell now that exercise opportunities in this city are going to be more difficult to find than in Salt Lake. Which is to say that I will have to actively seek out physical activity instead of it being built into the cultural lifestyle.

Seventh random thought: I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm losing my passion for things that I used to be passionate about. For example, I have not read tech news in a couple months. I am also less motivated to pursue extra curricular technology related activities. My best analysis at this point is that it is because my passion is being spread across more endeavors whereas previously I laid it thick onto just the job. This balance yields some evenness in my outlook, but I do have some serious reservations about my waning passion for all things technical. Frankly, the reason I can afford to live in this city is because I have had a relatively meteoritic rise in my career. I attribute that ascent to geek glory to really, really enjoying hacking software in favor of almost all other activity -- except being a hermit at home where I could read computer books for fun at nights and on the weekend.

That's about it for now. Like going running after a long break, one should not push too hard when getting back into writing after a long break.

Back in Action

I just realized that I need to update my blogger profile. This is because I no longer live in Salt Lake City. Ha. Fuck you, Utah, I escaped!

I am writing this from my new God-only-knows how small studio in Brooklyn that costs approximately double what my mortgage cost in Salt Lake City. Fortunately this is temporary housing before I take possession of my more permanent pad which, of course, will cost yet more per month. I also decided to immediately take part in the important New York right of passage: paying out the nose to a broker. Yay! Despite this, I'm feeling very good about the whole situation.

I suppose a recap is in order. When I filed my last report, there was a mention of a certain nauseating anxiety. I'm a little dense, so it took me overnight to figure out what the problem was: living in the home of a middle aged woman on the Upper West Side who changed the rent by fifty percent at the last minute and where I could not really have any friends over was what was causing the tingling palms and overwhelming sense of doom and fear. That and I did not have a job. Well, the next day both of those problems were solved. I stopped payment on the check I wrote to the middle aged temptress, apologized profusely, and cut her a no-hard-feelings check to assuage my guilt at backing out of the deal. That alone made me feel super duper. Then later that day, I got a job offer phone call. This was the company that I did have a full night's sleep prior to my interview. They made me what I consider to be a really good offer. Income: check. That just left me with the small problem that I had sold my home in Salt Lake and taken a job that was to start in three weeks, but did not have a place to land in New York!

As an aside, I realize that this chronicle-style blog is getting used a bit much. I promise to all my loyal reader(s) that I will write posts in alternate styles real soon now.

One thing I learned about getting housing in New York is that it is not worth bothering to find a place until a maximum of forty-eight hours prior to being ready to make a commitment. In other words, trying to find a place in New York from Salt Lake City just doesn't work. You have to be able to show up for an appointment the next day before people will take you seriously. I am actually fascinated by the sheer size of the housing market in New York. Just using craigslist, there are hundreds of housing listings coming and going everyday. The half-life on a listing, at my best guess, appears to be about 36 hours. If the opportunity is any good at all, more like 12 hours. Based on this newfound NYC savvy, I did not even bother to peruse craigslist until the day after I arrived in Ohio. Although I knew that this was the right move, it still yielded much nervousness. I had a truck full of my worldly possessions and a job starting in a week and a half. House or not, I had to go to New York. Long story short: the day I left Ohio I committed on an apartment that I had only seen a couple of pictures of. The next day (yesterday) I drove into the city, parked in front of the place, and signed a check. Sweet.

So here I am in my new apartment. It was rather filthy when I arrived. I used about a half a bottle of Soft Scrub to clean the bathroom and a heavy dose of Mop 'n Glo on the kitchen floor. It's now livable. Evidence for my residence here includes: milk in the refrigerator and everything else I own sitting in boxes in the studio.

Next on the agenda: get a life.

Back in Action

I just realized that I need to update my blogger profile. This is because I no longer live in Salt Lake City. Ha. Fuck you, Utah, I escaped!

I am writing this from my new God-only-knows how small studio in Brooklyn that costs approximately double what my mortgage cost in Salt Lake City. Fortunately this is temporary housing before I take possession of my more permanent pad which, of course, will cost yet more per month. I also decided to immediately take part in the important New York right of passage: paying out the nose to a broker. Yay! Despite this, I'm feeling very good about the whole situation.

I suppose a recap is in order. When I filed my last report, there was a mention of a certain nauseating anxiety. I'm a little dense, so it took me overnight to figure out what the problem was: living in the home of a middle aged woman on the Upper West Side who changed the rent by fifty percent at the last minute and where I could not really have any friends over was what was causing the tingling palms and overwhelming sense of doom and fear. That and I did not have a job. Well, the next day both of those problems were solved. I stopped payment on the check I wrote to the middle aged temptress, apologized profusely, and cut her a no-hard-feelings check to assuage my guilt at backing out of the deal. That alone made me feel super duper. Then later that day, I got a job offer phone call. This was the company that I did have a full night's sleep prior to my interview. They made me what I consider to be a really good offer. Income: check. That just left me with the small problem that I had sold my home in Salt Lake and taken a job that was to start in three weeks, but did not have a place to land in New York!

As an aside, I realize that this chronicle-style blog is getting used a bit much. I promise to all my loyal reader(s) that I will write posts in alternate styles real soon now.

One thing I learned about getting housing in New York is that it is not worth bothering to find a place until a maximum of forty-eight hours prior to being ready to make a commitment. In other words, trying to find a place in New York from Salt Lake City just doesn't work. You have to be able to show up for an appointment the next day before people will take you seriously. I am actually fascinated by the sheer size of the housing market in New York. Just using craigslist, there are hundreds of housing listings coming and going everyday. The half-life on a listing, at my best guess, appears to be about 36 hours. If the opportunity is any good at all, more like 12 hours. Based on this newfound NYC savvy, I did not even bother to peruse craigslist until the day after I arrived in Ohio. Although I knew that this was the right move, it still yielded much nervousness. I had a truck full of my worldly possessions and a job starting in a week and a half. House or not, I had to go to New York. Long story short: the day I left Ohio I committed on an apartment that I had only seen a couple of pictures of. The next day (yesterday) I drove into the city, parked in front of the place, and signed a check. Sweet.

So here I am in my new apartment. It was rather filthy when I arrived. I used about a half a bottle of Soft Scrub to clean the bathroom and a heavy dose of Mop 'n Glo on the kitchen floor. It's now livable. Evidence for my residence here includes: milk in the refrigerator and everything else I own sitting in boxes in the studio.

Next on the agenda: get a life.

Scared (and not 'cause of Halloween)

Here I am in JFK. In a few minutes I'll be getting on a plane destined for Salt Lake City. I just spent the past four days on a whirlwind adventure. I had two goals for this trip: get a job and get a place to live. Well, I've got a place to live. My aching checkbook will vouch for that. As for the job, that's a little more interesting.

On Wednesday morning, I woke up at approximately my normal waking time. At 11:15 MST, I boarded my flight to New York. At 5:15 EST, the flight arrived at JFK. At 7:30, I was in the East Village dropping off my bag at the room I secured for the weekend. At 11:00 I was checking out my first housing opportunity. When 1:00 came around, I had both been awake for thirty straight hours and I was getting started on a marathon four-hour job interview.

Here's a good rule of thumb for all my loyal readers: do not, let me repeat for clarity, DO NOT show up to an interview for a job you care about in a strange city after taking a red-eye and being awake for thirty plus hours straight. As it turns out, there's a reasonable chance you will not give your best performance! Fuck me. So, no job offer from that company. I even sent them a follow up to their denial email commending them for making the right choice. I mean, if I were hiring for my small company and some joker showed up looking half dead, I wouldn't hire that person. On the other hand, these fuckers sent me an email to tell me I wasn't getting the job; I'm not sure I deserved that little respect.

Coupling that with the job denial that I got earlier in the week, I was rearing to go for my second in-person interview on Friday. It's amazing what some sleep can do for you. Interview #2 went just about as well as I might have hoped. I'm still feeling pessimistic for unknown reasons. I do not expect to get this job either. Too bad, because it's the one that I've wanted all along. I got the feeling that my salary requirement might have been too high. Dammit. Stay tuned for the dramatic conclusion to this one.

I did sign a check for a room. I will be living on the Upper West Side with an Armenian jazz pianist who takes photos for the trapeze school during the day and a recently empty nested woman who appears to be about the same age as my mom.

I am now officially scared. My wrists are tingling from the sick to the stomach, ill feeling that has pervaded me since I wrote the check for my room. The finality of all these decisions and actions I've been making over the past several weeks is hitting home. My home for the last five years is going to sell. My cat is living in Ohio. I just paid for two months rent of a room what was buying me three months of mortgage. Holy fucking shit, lord almighty, damn damn damn -- I am now past the point of no return. And I am viscerally scared. I have no real friends in New York. I've only got a couple of acquaintances. To boot, I've been guilty of dicking around several people on my quest to find a place to live. That's what is scaring me the most. There is now evidence on the table that me being in New York might make me a worse person. Or maybe it amplifies the bad person I already am.

I think I'm going to go yack and then curl up in the fetal position on the bathroom floor. Yeah, that seems like the best plan at this point.

My Dad

I booked a flight for my dad to come out to Utah in a couple weeks. He's going to arrive a couple days before I take off for New York. He's going to ride with me in the truck back to Ohio. He has never been to Utah and wants to see it before I leave. He also just wants to see me. It has been a long time. In fact, I actually do not recall the last time I saw my dad. I think it might have been Christmas of 2004. Hmmm, nope, can't think of any time after that.

So now we dig deep into the black trunk. The reason I booked the flight for my dad is twofold. One is that he does not have any money. Secondly he does not have any credit and thus does have a credit card necessary to book a flight. And a third reason is that he does not have a computer. Dad just got out of prison a couple months ago. Let's not get into that at the moment though.

When I was a young lad, my dad was responsible for putting my head into the windshield of his car. He also taught me how to cut my fingernails and wipe my butt. In college, I had an epiphany moment; my dad wasn't really rolling his own cigarettes as he told me, he was rolling joints! There were plenty of other childhood experiences with my dad that I considered normal/okay/reasonable that now make me cringe. With my dad, everything got sprinkled with a healthy dose of crazy.

But what do you expect from a man who is clinically bi-polar and a prototypical narcissist?

I've been talking to my dad a lot lately. It's been nice since he seems to have his head right at the moment. Who knows how long that will last, but right now he seems to be off the bad drugs and hopefully on the good ones.

I don't know what it's going to be like hangin' with pops for a week straight. I think it will be good having company for the drive. He can't help drive, of course, since the state of Ohio is unwilling to issue him a driver's license. But if I can keep the conversation away from crazy deals he's brewing and money in general, it might be okay.

Did I mention that he has stolen money from me in the past. Twice. Ouch. The second time was officially a defaulted loan that was written off when he declared bankruptcy, but the fact that he put the money into a Cadillac and crack, I still consider it stealing. The other time was when I was much younger. He had co-signed on my savings account. This was the little-kid first savings account for depositing Christmas money from Grandma and so forth. Ostensibly he needed to pay the rent, so he cleaned out my account. In retrospect, it seems pretty likely that that money went towards crack also. Fuck crack.

Note to self: keep wallet in pocket at all times.

The reason I am letting him come out here is because for strange, unknown reasons, I still love the man. And he has never expressed anything but love for me. And I'm probably retarded in my judgement of human character. Maybe it's time to invest in one of those wallet chains.

Three Pronged Attack

So Pete, what's the matter? Got writer's block or what? I mean, it's been a hellofa long time since you've posted. Did life get boring, dude? You suck.

Oh contraire. Life for me lately most resembles an avalanche. Inertia builds as I snip away at my ties to Utah.

I spent Monday morning bawling on the phone to my brother because I had actually gone through with putting Mr Orange on an airplane bound for Detroit. I felt better later that day when my bro picked up the O-man safely, but saying goodbye to what at times felt like my only friend was ... incomprehensible. I miss my kitty; he's a good buddy. I got my daily updates from both the brother and the sister-in-law today. Apparently Mr Orange has already found himself a nighttime spot on the bed. It makes it a lot easier on me if I know he's happy, of course.

Tuesday I hunkered down in the war room with my real estate agent and good friend, R. We played a high stakes game of offer-counteroffer with my house on the line. Fortune smiled on me that day. With two offers, both over my asking price, it was more stressful than you might imagine. When two people are jonesing after your apartment with this much fervor, you can't help but feel bad when you put the big REJECTED stamp on one of them. Sorry baby, your sugar just wasn't sweet enough. Bottom line here: I sold my house. Yay!

Selling the house was one of three events that was to force my hand into moving. The other two were finding a place to live in New York and securing a job. Those other two are in progress. The job hunt is in full swing. Actually, it's past the hunt stage and well into courtship. You know, they are infatuated and I'm getting the sweet goodnight kisses. Unlike with the ladies, I can keep my cool with potential employers, so all indicators are that I will get an offer or two in a week or so.

As for the finding a place to live problem, that's a different story. The reason I haven't been writing here lately is because I've been spending seemingly every last minute doing two things: searching craigslist for housing opportunities and crafting careful emails to potential roommates trying to convince them that at the same time I am interesting/cool/etc. and also that I'm not a serial killer despite the fact that I'm moving to NYC out of the blue. I've got a pretty good formula for it now, but it still takes me about an hour to come up with the proper strategy for one of these cold emails. I'm getting nervous about this one. I've got four days on my upcoming pre-move trip to New York to nail down a place. It's not at all clear to me that I'll be able to pull it off. Oh well, what's the worst that could happen? I might drive into New York with a truck full of shit and nowhere to live. I wouldn't be the first homeless person in New York, right?

So my brilliant three pronged attack game plan seems to be holding up as I enter the final stretch. I've got about two weeks left in SLC, minus the four days I'm in New York. On the agenda for tonight: figure out the guest list for the "Don't let the door hit you in the ass" party being thrown in my honor.

TTFN.

First of Many Lasts

It is getting down to where I am considering whether or not particular activities here in Salt Lake City might be my last. My friend S. came into some tickets to tonight's Real Salt Lake game, so we turned it into a little date and had some sushi before riding the train up to the game. As it turned out, this was S.'s first soccer game ever. She was a fabulous sport and took great interest in learning the game. There were a couple of goals and the weather held up nicely. S. claimed adamantly that she really, really liked the soccer game and I tend to believe her. So, very likely this was my last RSL game for probably ever.

Don't it always seem to go
that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone

Sorry, Joni, but no, not really. The O-man leaves for the motherland on Monday. I know what that's going to be like and I already have pity for the person who questions the lack of composure I am sure to have on that day. Furthermore, working with my friends on a daily basis, having a ton of space to myself, having a car, and having mature friendships are all things that I got. I hereby state for the record that they are incredibly valuable to me and before I loose these things, I already know that a large amount of pain will stem from my intentional abandonment of these things. So I do know what I've got before it's gone. S. reminded me tonight what a fabulous set of friends I've gotten mixed up with.

I'm likely to have numerous complaints in the upcoming months about the difficulties and disappointments of living in New York City. I just don't want anyone to try to make a claim that I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I do know. It will suck. I'm gambling for deferred rewards and personal growth. To hell with easy and comfortable.